Ray Kurzweil — American author, inventor, and (here’s a title that would look sexy on a business card) futurist — was a guest on the Colbert Report this week, where he gave his usual spiel about the inevitable man-machine meld (or “M3,” as I’m calling it) that, in his opinion, is only a few decades away from widespread acceptance and implementation.
(Canuckers, find it here.)
For those who have decided to skip the video, the M3 theory hinges on the idea of a technological singularity, which Wikipedia defines as
a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid and the growth of artificial intelligence is so great that the future after the singularity become qualitatively different and harder to predict.
[...]
With the increasing power of computers and other technologies, it might eventually be possible to build a machine that is more intelligent than humanity. If superhuman intelligences were invented, either through the amplification of human intelligence or artificial intelligence, it would bring to bear greater problem-solving and inventive skills than humans, then it could design a yet more capable machine, or re-write its source code to become more intelligent. This more capable machine then could design a machine of even greater capability. These iterations could accelerate, leading to recursive self improvement, potentially allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in.
Freaky shit, right? And perhaps easily dismissed as the stuff of pulpy sci-fi fantasy. But such a dismissal would be a dangerous abdication of our moral and intellectual responsibility when we live in a world where technology that can translate dreams to images and allow a human to control a robot with his or her mind is already a few years old.
In the interview and elsewhere, Kurzweil puts the approximate date of this singularity at 2045 (though he has already revised it upward several times), but whether he’s 10 years or 100 years too early, it seems to me that he’s probably going to be proven right eventually. For the vast majority of recorded human history (and undoubtedly even more so before it was recorded), the beginning and end of any given century has featured few observable differences — especially in terms of the technology and medicine available to the masses. There have always been incremental improvements, naturally, but life-changing developments like fire, metallurgy, gun powder, etc. were few and far between. But then our big brains started to rebel, coming into their own during the 18th and 19th centuries to bring us the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, light bulbs, railroads, antibiotics, and a host of other things about which The Google would be happy to illuminate you. So by the time the transistor appeared in the first half of the 20th century, we were good and primed for a Cambrian-style technological explosion.
Imagine the qualitative difference in life for a twenty-something in 1900 and a twenty-something in 2000. Now examine how different that same twenty-something’s life has become just between 2000 and today. Eleven years ago, the world wide web certainly existed, but you were probably accessing it via dial up. Google was around — though in its infancy — but the two faces of today’s social networking revolution, Facebook and Twitter, were but gleams in their nerdlington overlords’ eyes. iPods? Nope. HDMI? Nuh uh. Reliable civilian GPS units? Get lost. Mass-produced hybrid vehicles? Only in Japan. Black presidents? Not even on 24 — because that didn’t exist yet either.
The point is, Moore’s Law is only the most literal and concrete example of how technological advances feed on themselves to create more technological advances at an even faster rate than the previous ones. Scope this delicious photo from the afore-cited Wiki link:
According to the caption, it depicts
An Osborne Executive portable computer, from 1982, and an iPhone, released 2007 (iPhone 3G in picture). The Executive weighs 100 times as much, has nearly 500 times the volume, cost 10 times as much, and has 100th the clock frequency of the iPhone.
Even if you extrapolate linearly from the contrast illustrated above, the personal electronics that we’ll have access to 25 years from now Bananagrams® the mind. Throw exponentiality into the mix and, as Kurzweil alludes to multiple time in the interview, you’re looking at a world that is borderline unrecognizable — perhaps not in its day-to-day functionality and relationships, but certainly in the technology underlying them. And given the trouble people already have “keeping up” (in a comprehensive sense) with new advances in computing, gaming, medicine, et al, Kurzweil’s claims that we will literally need to become part machine in order to process and apply all the new information coming at us in the future is not as far fetched as it sounds.
For a long time, I was ambivalent about the idea of pursuing blatant artificial improvement. If I could take a pill that would make me better at calculus, would I? If I could implant a port in my brain that accepted Matrix-style inputs to teach me karate, helicopter flying, and the fine art of soufflé, should I? Would I still be me?
Only recently have I decided, Hell yes I would!
Think about it: humans have been “artificially” improving their natural condition ever since Adam and Eve first looked down, noticed their man and lady bits flopping around in the breeze, and grabbed frantically for the nearest photosynthetic undergarment they could find. Then fire made us artificially warmer, wheels made us artificially faster, penicillin made us artificially healthier, and computers made us artificially smarter (with some other stuff in between, of course). So if pacemakers can keep our hearts pumping, carbon fiber can keep our legs pumping, and neurostimulators can keep our brains pumping, it’s likely that the only thing keeping the end products of Kurzweil’s theories (assuming they bear out) from widespread acceptance is time. After all, it’s not like we went from peg legs to biomechanical transtibial prostheses overnight. Rather, the pattern of Advancement/Acceptance occurred (and occurs) along a self-fulfilling continuum, with each half of the relationship spurring the other half forward. I’m sure a lot of people weren’t psyched when we first began tossing pig valves into human hearts, but now they’re as commonplace as the bacon in your breakfast buffet.
All of which is a sideways way of saying that the idea of treating your brain like a highly customizable combination of hardware and software might seem impossible to achieve (or, granting achievement, accept) today — April 14, 2011 — but 30-plus years from now, when the world looks even less like today than today looks like 1975…well, all I can say is, pass the helicopters, please.
